The Sheikh's Collection. Оливия Гейтс

wrong.’

      ‘Sara,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do your job properly, then you really shouldn’t come to work.’

      She swallowed. ‘That bad, huh?’

      He shrugged. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

      Miserably, she shook her head. Gabe was a good boss in many ways but she knew what they said about him—steely by name and steely by nature. ‘Not really.’

      ‘Look, take a week off,’ he said. ‘And for God’s sake, sort it out.’

      She nodded, thinking that men really were very different from women. It was all so black and white to them. What if it couldn’t be sorted out? What if Suleiman had gone from her life for good?

      She left the building and walked out into the fresh air, where a gust of wind seemed to blow right through her. She hugged her sheepskin coat closer and began to walk, thinking about the things Suleiman had said to her.

      Thoughts she’d been trying to block out were now given free rein as she examined them. Had she run away from her old life and tried to deny it? Pretended that part of her didn’t exist?

      Yes, she had.

      Had she behaved thoughtlessly, neglecting the only family she had? Rushing away from the wedding celebrations and not even bothering to get on a plane to go and see her new niece?

      She closed her eyes.

      Yes, again.

      She’d thought of herself as so independent and mature, and yet the first thing she had done was to lift up the phone to Suleiman. What had she been planning to say to him? Start whining that she missed him and wanted him to come back to make her feel better?

      That wasn’t independence, was it? That was more like co-dependence. And you couldn’t rely on somebody else to make you feel better about yourself.

      She needed to face up to the stuff she’d locked away for so long. She’d been so busy playing the part of Sara Williams who had integrated so well into English life and making sure she fitted in that she had forgotten the other Sara.

      The desert princess. The sister. The auntie.

      And that other Sara was just as important.

      A lump came into her throat as she lifted her hand to hail a cab and during the drive to her apartment she started making plans to try to put it right.

      She managed to get a flight out to Dhi’ban later that evening. It meant she would have a two-hour stopover in Qurhah, but she could cope with that. Oddly enough, she wasn’t tempted to ask her brother to send a plane to Qurhah to collect her—and she would sooner walk bare-footed across the desert than ask Suleiman to come to her aid.

      She spent the intervening hours shopping and packing and then she dressed as conservatively and as unobtrusively as possible, because she didn’t want anyone getting wind of her spontaneous visit.

      The journey was long and tiring and she blinked with surprise when eventually she arrived at Dhi’ban’s main airport, because she hardly recognised it. The terminal buildings had been extended and were now gleaming and modern. There were loads of shops selling cosmetics and beautiful Dhi’banese jewellery and clothes. And there...

      She looked up to see a portrait of her brother, the King, and she thought how stern he looked. Sterner than she’d ever seen him, wearing the crown that her father had worn.

      Inevitably, she was recognised as she went through Customs, but she waved aside the troubled protestations of the officials, telling them that she had no desire for a red carpet.

      ‘I didn’t want any kind of fuss or reception,’ she said, smiling as she held up the large pink parcel she had purchased at Qurhah’s airport. ‘I want this to be a surprise. For my niece, the princess Ayesha.’

      The palm-fringed road was reassuringly familiar and when she saw her childhood home appear in the distance, with the morning light bouncing off the white marble, she felt her heart twist with a mixture of pleasure and pain.

      She’d never seen the guards outside the main gates look more surprised than when she stepped from the airport cab into the bright sunshine. But today she wasn’t impatient when they bowed deeply. Today she recognised that they were just doing their job. They respected her position as Princess—and maybe it was about time that she started respecting it, too.

      She walked through the grounds and into the palace. Her watch told her that it was almost two o’clock and she wondered if her brother was working. She realised that she didn’t know anything about his life and she barely knew Ella, his wife.

      But before she could decide what to do next, there was Haroun walking towards her. His features—a stronger, more masculine version of her own—were initially perplexed and then he broke into a wide smile as he held out his arms.

      ‘Is it really you, Sara?’

      ‘It really is me,’ she whispered, glad that he chose that moment to gather her in his arms in a most un-Kingly bear-hug, which meant that she had time to blink away her tears and compose herself.

      Within the hour she was sitting with Haroun and his wife Ella and begging their forgiveness. She told them she felt guilty about her absence, but if they were prepared to forgive her—she would like to be part of their lives. And could she please see her niece?

      The royal couple looked at one another and smiled with deep satisfaction, before Ella hugged her tightly and said Ayesha was sleeping, and that Sara could see her once they had taken tea.

      The three of them sat in the scented bower of the rose garden and drank mint tea. She started to tell them about the Sultan, but of course Haroun knew about the cancelled wedding, because the politicians and diplomats from the two countries were working on a new alliance.

      ‘So you’ve seen Murat?’ she asked cautiously.

      ‘I have.’

      ‘And did he...did he seem upset?’

      ‘Not unless your idea of upset is being photographed with a stunning woman,’ laughed Haroun.

      It was only after gentle prompting that she was persuaded to tell them about Suleiman and how much she loved him. Her voice was shaky as she said it, because she’d realised that the truth was something she couldn’t keep running from either.

      ‘But it’s over,’ she said.

      Ella looked at Haroun, and frowned. ‘You like Suleiman, don’t you, darling?’

      ‘I don’t like him when I’m playing backgammon,’ Haroun growled.

      Sara was shown to her old room and there, set between the two gold-framed portraits of her late mother and father, was a book about horses, which Suleiman had bought for her twelfth birthday, just before she’d left for England.

      For the brave and fearless Sara, he had written. Your friend, Suleiman. Always.

      And that was when the sobs began to erupt from her throat, because she had been none of those things, had she? She had not been brave and fearless—she had been a coward who had run away and hidden and neglected her family. She hadn’t lived up to Suleiman’s expectations of her. She hadn’t been a real friend. She hadn’t fulfilled her potential in so many ways.

      She bathed and changed and dried her eyes and Ella knocked on the door, to take her to the nursery. And that was poignant, too. Shielded from the light by swathed swags of softest tulle lay a sleeping baby in the large, rocking cot she had slept in herself. For a moment Sara touched the side and felt it sway, watching as Ella lifted out the sleepy infant.

      Ayesha was soft and smiling, with a mop of silken curls and a pair of deep violet eyes. Sara felt her heart fill with love as she touched her fingertip to the baby’s plump and rosy cheek.

      ‘Oh, she’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘How old is she now?’

      ‘Nine